Software Release History

Production versions of Firebird have been in distribution since the beginning of 2002, but the
ancestry of the software goes much further back. It began as InterBase in 1985, for the Unix-like
VMS platform of that period. It passed into the hands of Borland Software Corporation in the early
1990s through acquisition and evolved through the years to version 5.6. Late in 1999, financial
conditions in Borland caused its version 6 development to be stopped. The following year, the
InterBase 6 source code was released to the public under an open source licence in July 2000. Two
Australian developers downloaded the newly released source code and set up the Firebird Project at
Sourceforge, a huge server farm that provides sophisticated facilities free of charge to open source
developers.

Initial Release

The months between the collapse of IB development at Borland and the source code release
consolidated the former InterBase developer base into a lively, enthusiastic Firebird community of
designers, testers, tools and interface developers and support gurus. By the time the source code
was released, a substantial team was ready to get stuck in. Firebird never looked back. Firebird
1.0—essentially a code cleanup of the IB 6 C-language code with some important fixes to the build
system and some long-standing bugs—was released in 2002 and ran to four sub-releases.

Current Release Version

Firebird 1.5, initially released in March, 2004, was a complete revamping of the codebase from C to
C++ to prepare the way for essential architectural enhancements planned for Firebird 2. The most
recent production release, Firebird 1.5.3, is highly stable and has had the benefit of some important
back-porting from the Firebird 2 development.

In Development

Firebird 2

Firebird 2, which features significant enhancements to many of its subsystems, including the SQL
optimizer, is currently in its second beta testing cycle. The full release is expected by mid-year
2006.

"Vulcan"

A "fork" was taken from the early Firebird 2 alpha code in December 2003 for the purpose of
redesigning the threading architecture of the database engine. The project, implemented by the
original developer of InterBase (Jim Starkey) was commissioned for SAS Institute, the world's
largest privately-owned vendor of statistics application software. SAS adopted Firebird in 2003 to
deliver richer RDBMS commodity features as part of its storage offering. The sources,
code-named "Vulcan", were formally handed over to the Firebird project in 2005 and continue to be
developed in parallel with Firebird 2. The first public beta-testing cycle of Vulcan is due to begin
about mid-year 2006.

Firebird 3

Merging Firebird 2 and the Vulcan code has started, with the objective of releasing Firebird 3 early
in 2007. Firebird 3 will have full support for fine-grained thread management on multi-core and
multiple-CPU hosts, full utilisation of 64-bit system features and a raft of configuration options for
customising both server and database-level security.